The Garden Of Love Flashcards
What is the garden of love about?
The speaker is returning to ‘the garden of love’ where he once felt joy and love, but now the church has disrupted the beauty and replaced it with tombstones and priests giving orders. The beauty of life is dampened by the rules I forced by the church. A natural thing like sex is now not beautiful but sinful.
Blake favoured natural living and the New Testament and hated all of the rules which crushed childhood joy and disrupted life and growth
What is its sister poem?
This poem is from the songs of experience
Its sister poem is from the songs of innocence and called the echoing green. The illustration for garden of love is very static but the echoing green has movement and life
What can be said about the rhyme?
In the three quatranes, it has an ABCB simple rhyme structure, this mirrors how simple and correct life was when the church didn’t run everything.
However, in the last two lines, they are visually longer (refers to the length of time the priest walks his rounds, and also the disruption and disorder of the church). But they have internal rhyme which portrays a sense of entrapment in their power
What does the repetition of and signify?
It emphasises the amount of rules and orders of the church and how they get stricter throughout life
What is the significance of the link to the garden of Eden?
The garden of Eden is where life started. Started with love, it still prevails
Humans sinned and god brought in death, he has brought in too much suffering for such little sin. His punishment is affecting everyone
Religion has turned to ‘thou shalt not’ rather than love, freedom and giving life
‘I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what i never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where i used to play on the green’
The first stanza is very euphoric, emphasises how the garden and life once was. Simple mono and duosyllabic phrasing
- ‘never’ is negative language which is central to the stanza, like the church being a central part of life
- ‘Built’ is a man-made action which disrupts nature, way of life is obstructed
- ‘green’ contrasts to the dark gothic colours of the church
‘Thou shalt not’
Blake hated all of the church’s rules and orders, god gave life but is also ruining it. Monosyllabic and harsh imperative, closed constanants.
Refers to the Ten Commandments in the Old Testament where there are rules of sins. It doesn’t specifically say what we mustn’t do, which implies that the church is watching everything we do and that everything is wrong.
The line it is in is longer which shows how the church is disrupting order
‘So I turned to the Garden of love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.’
- ‘.’ At end of stanza to show how this joy has finished
- it implies that the garden was previously for love making and the flowers are a metaphor for children - religion is restricting the simple beauty and joy of children
This is echoed by ‘bore’
‘And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be,’
Uprooting of flowers, killing life and joy
Semantic field of death, in last stanza, it is the last and ongoing message of life and the church
‘And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,’
‘Black gowns’ is gothic colours which contrasts to colourful flowers and green. Highlights the church’s focus on death.
‘Gowns’ and ‘rounds’ are very open vowels. Lethargic and slow pace, the church isn’t going to stop
Internal rhymes, being trapped. The longer lines (priests making rounds), the church is ever growing and smothering life. The lines are also split in two, like natural loving relations being split by the church
‘And binding with briars my joys and desires’
- ‘briars’ are thorny plants, repressive and painful (grows rapidly like the control of the church and line length). Reference to Jesus as well, how cruel god is to put him through suffering. Love and kindness is suffering and dying. Why are priests still making people suffer when god sent his own son’
- ends on ‘desires’, sensual overtone , the church can’t suppress natural sensual craving
